


Lost Without You

by Erato_Muse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, Harpies, Holyhead Harpies, Lake District, Quidditch, Quidditch Player Ginny Weasley, Travel, Valentine's Day, anglesey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:41:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28517313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erato_Muse/pseuds/Erato_Muse
Summary: Ginny Weasley grows close to a fellow female Quidditch player in her first couple of years on the Holyhead Harpies...closer than she's ever felt to another young woman, closer than she feels to Harry, who is always away on top secret Auror missions. When Harry can't make a Valentine's Day trip to the Lake District, Ginny invites her teammate, Bronagh, and as the two get lost on a hike, their true feelings won't stay hidden any longer.
Relationships: Ginny Weasley/Original Female Character(s), Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 6
Kudos: 4
Collections: With Love Weasley





	Lost Without You

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [With_Love_Weasley](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/With_Love_Weasley) collection. 



> This is for the Weasleys, Witches, and Writer's Facebook group's Valentine's Writing Fest.

Ginny would have been lost without Bronagh, when she first joined the Holyhead Harpies. After growing up in a large, closeknit family, and attending a boarding school with three of her siblings and all her closest friends in residence, being on the island of Anglesey, where the Harpies trained, amongst strangers was hard. Ginny had stared up at her Gwenog Jones poster many times as a girl, on summer days when the smell of sun ripening apples and the joyful hoots and whoops of her brothers on their brooms amongst the trees floated through their bedroom window, and while her skin tingled with the intense effort of not running outside and begging to join them, the buxom blonde Chaser and Captain seemed to look at her with a saucy, knowing smile, saying, ‘One day, it’ll be your turn.” She’d fantasize about being a Harpy, a fierce pro-Quidditch player streaking through the sky like a Valkyrie in battle, written about is sports magazines, interviewed on wizard radio.  
She’d figured the team would be made of girls like her, who had to practice in secret and play mum when their brothers talked about statistics and draft picks, who had to suppress anxious nausea like she did when she finally worked up the nerve to tap Angelina Johnson on her formidable shoulder and manage to hoarsely say, “I want to try out for Chaser.”  
She was wrong. Out of the seven players on the roster, Ginny was the youngest, and the most green. She didn’t have any relatives who’d gone before her in the pros, or played in illustrious leagues in another country, trained with any retired greats, or gone to an international competition with her school team. As the girls traded juvenilia over pints of dark ale in the only wizard pub on Anglesey, the polite stares of her six teammates confirmed to Ginny how clumsy and overwhelming the words felt coming out of her mouth were as she tried to contribute her best school days story, her Quidditch Cup victory in he fifth year. She could tell they didn’t get it: what it meant to win playing Seeker, the position she never quite felt suited to, Harry’s position, and the way the air felt between her and Harry as they ran to each other and kissed, both of them making up their mind at the same moment to do it, the trophy shining in her hand.  
Maybe that was when the day started to feel small and lacking to her, too.  
Before she even realized she had consented to be cast as an ingenue or protégé, Bronagh had taken her under her wing. Their pints alone at the pub, when the rest of the team was otherwise preoccupied, their walks down the beach, or their long talks about any and everything lying in the dark of their dormitory room came to feel as if Ginny had known no other life. They had a good chemistry in the air, too, which was a good thing as Bronagh was a Beater, and her job was to guard Ginny, a Chaser. She’d read and heard that Chasers and Beaters often bonded deeply, and it was both fortunate and necessary: the roles were so symbiotic, they needed trust.  
Of course she trusted Bronagh-they showered and changed clothes round each other, patched up each other’s injuries, affectionately and carefully pressing beige bandages softly to bruised and cut flesh, sat on each other’s beds wearing soaked towels while the smell of Molly’s homemade honeysuckle and wild rose shampoo rose from their wet hair. Their arms were close enough to touch as their poured over ‘Quidditch Weekly’ magazine, and the Daily Prophet Sports pages, and the drops of shower water on their skin mingled.  
“Night, love,” Bronagh often said, when she was the one who turned in and clicked the bedside light off, first, and when the urge to kiss Bronagh’s wet black hair intruded in Ginny’s thoughts like a wild horse leaping into an orchard meadow, Ginny knew she had a problem.  
Where had that mad urge come from? She had never had that kind of friendship with Hermione or Luna, in school-the Parvati and Lavender kind, where you air kiss each of each other’s cheeks like French matrons, give each other hairstyles in the middle of meals, and walk arm in arm. Hermione was prim and brusque, Luna an airy loner, neither of them would have stood it, and Ginny had never thought to attempt it. But her belly filled with the need to press her lips to Bronagh’s hair-wet and glinting like a glassy black volcanic stone-had not only intruded upon her mind, but filled her belly and stolen the air from her throat in a way that the thought of touching Harry never did. Even that first kiss had been one of more ebullience than desire…and the ones by the lake had satisfied her more from the power she felt, as the one leading him about, showing him where to kiss, to touch, exactly as she liked, delighting that the great hero Harry Potter was hers’ to tenderly command.  
Bronagh was three years older, and stridently confident. She was the one to check Ginny’s pregame mood with a gauging touch of her thigh, knee, or shoulder, satisfied when Ginny gave her a nod and gripped her broom surely, ready to fly, ready to win. It was Bronagh who knew when Ginny was ready to leave the after-game pub crawl, drunker of sleepier than she would admit. If anyone was going to lead a kiss between them, as Ginny had on those sunlit days by the lake with Harry, it would be Bronagh, and Ginny lay in bed nursing this knowledge like a harsh medicine crawling through her veins, until she became drowsy slept beneath the roar of the ocean off Anglesey as if it was a blanket, that she could hide under.

“Why don’t you take Bronagh?” Harry asked.  
Ginny regarded her erstwhile boyfriend with some surprise on the other side of the mirror. While the mirror Sirius Black had given him was beyond repair, Harry hadn’t abandoned the concept, and had commissioned a pair of two-way mirrors for he and Ginny to communicate when she was in the Anglesey training camp, and he was…wherever. The locations of Harry’s missions were classified, of course, but she had always loved reading atlases and travel accounts, so guessing by the scenery was light work for Ginny-she could tell by the color of the sand or the ocean of a beach, the density of foliage, or the music drifting out of a passing car where Harry’s pursuit of dark wizards had taken him. Quite apart from that skinny boy in baggy clothes she could count on seeing every holiday, around school and on the train to and from it, he had now missed more family dinners, date nights, and Harpies games than he had attended in the last year and a half. She hadn’t really had sanguine hopes for their Lake District Valentine’s Day holiday, but she hadn’t expected that.  
“Bronagh? Oh, so you do listen to my stories about work, after all,” Ginny said drily,  
“You really think I wouldn’t know your teammates’ names?” Harry quipped.  
“Well, I have it on good report-that is, Witch Weekly-that your favorite team is actually Puddlemere United, not the Harpies. So, I had to wonder,” Ginny said.  
“Did Wood say that? I’ll have to send him a line not to talk to the press,” Harry said.  
“With a Department of Magical Law Enforcement Seal, I take it?” Ginny asked.  
“Couldn’t hurt,” Harry said, with a shrug.  
Ginny laughed. She loved bantering back and forth with him, like this, always amazed that her tongue and her brain could work at the same time around him. She couldn’t even talk to her brothers this way, they saw her as a nuisance or a vaguely cute boutique animal, not a friend.  
“Overkill, Auror Potter,” she said.  
“I’ll leave it off then,” Harry said, and his smile was…well, it was his smile.  
Benevolent, inviting, with a hint of intensity from the glow of contentment in those dark green eyes…but, that smile didn’t strike her with lightning the way it did when she was 11. What’s more, she didn’t want to run up and kiss him like after she had won the cup, nor did she feel the same urgent pull in her stomach as when Bronagh so much as gave her a highfive.  
She had noticed for a while that it was getting worse…that she felt a wintry ocean’s shipwrecking waves in her stomach if Bronagh’s chest crushed hers’ in a victory hug, if her breath grazed Ginny’s neck as she cried, “We did it, Weasley!” as they all cheered and jumped on wobbly legs, their feet getting accustomed to the green pitch after the air, if Bronagh laughed or made her laugh, like with her adorably offkey singing at the yearly Harpies’ Christsmas party karaoke challenge, if her towel slipped enough to show the decolletage of her ample, pillowy breasts.  
“Night love,” Bronagh told her as always, and Ginny lay in the dark burning to kiss not just her wet hair, but her wet and rosy skin redolent of honeysuckle and rose from the lanes and meadows by Ginny’s own house. Bronagh’s skin in the dark was the smell of the same meadows where Ginny had taught herself to play Quidditch.  
Harry’s green eyes looked like an enchanted fire…and they had a knowing glint, as if he could read her thoughts, and knew all this…she didn’t want anyone in her head again, not even him…  
“So, I take it you can’t make it-and that’s all right, I understand-but…what made you think of me taking Bronagh?” Ginny asked.  
“She’s your best mate, isn’t she?” Harry said.  
“Beaters and Chasers tend to get close,” Ginny said, and realized it came out defensively, and that she felt piqued.  
“Yeah, she guards you really…closely,” Harry said.  
“She felt sorry for me when I first joined the team…I was the youngest, the least experienced, far from home, and redheaded,” Ginny said.  
Harry laughed, and said, “I’ve sort of got a thing for redheads, you know.”  
Ginny smiled…but, the smile didn’t reach her belly, or her heart. Was that really still true? Harry seemed as comfortable missing their Lake District trip as she was allowing him to. She said it was okay, and it really was…but, should it be?  
“Anyway, you can’t mean you think she’s friends with you out of pity,” Harry said.  
“No! Of course not. I mean, I think she started out just trying to be nice, but…” Ginny began, but stopped at the sound of the doorknob turning.  
“My bloody shoulders!” Bronagh exclaimed and as soon as the door was closed behind her, started doing stretches. Ginny actually heard an audible pop echo from within Bronagh’s body as she did so.  
“Sounds like you need a rubdown. Mum sent more of that arnica, clay, and lavender stuff you like,” Ginny said.  
Bronagh grimaced in pleasure at her loosening muscles, and sighed, then shook out her black hair. It was like the thick and mussed mane of a mustang on the American prairie.  
“Your Mum’s an angel,” Bronagh said.  
“Don’t I know it,” Harry said. “ All right, Bronagh?”  
“Harry-looking forward to Windermere?” Bronagh said, with that easy conversationalism that made all the world seem her old friend. Ginny envied her it.  
“Actually, I cant make it. I got held up on…some business. But, I thought you might like to go?” Harry said.  
Bronagh looked humbly surprised, but pleasantly so, also. She pointed to her soft, full chest, and said, “Me? Well…The Lake District. Are you wooing me? Is this a menage a trois thing? I’d love to say I get that all the time, but it’s a first, and I’m honored.”  
Ginny thought she was used to the salty talk of the sports world, but that actually managed to get a healthy blush out of her. Harry, well used to the even saltier talk of dark wizard hunters, laughed far more freely than he ever had at Hogwarts or the Burrow. He wasn’t trying to disappear from his own fame, amongst the Aurors, or blend in amongst people of whom he was in awe, as he had always been in awe of her family, having none of his own. Harry, simply put, was where he belonged, and though he had never looked more vivid or seemed more content, with every mirror call and missed meeting, Ginny felt she knew him a little less.  
“Oh, we’ve shocked her, look at that,” Bronagh said, and hugged Ginny around the shoulders.  
The waves in her stomach began, at the rub of Bronagh’s skin and the smell of her sweat and wet hair. She’d probably doused a bottle of Coventina’s Spring bottled water over her head, no matter the overcast day and air promising rain-she always got overheated at practice, and always swung her Beater’s bat with good form but a worrying fierceness. Heat lanced Ginny in anticipation of smearing her tight shoulders with Molly’s handmade cream…heat followed by guilt, towards her mother, who didn’t know that her wares were aiding Ginny’s secret pleasures, towards Harry, who seemed to be asking her to admit something…but this feeling was not quite as bass-heavy a beat as her anxiety for Bronagh to say yes to the Lake District.  
Ginny could not be generous or patient when she wanted someone. Her desire always ruled, and even when it faded ignominiously, it had always begun in a fever.  
“I mean, I hope I’m not assuming too much. Were you doing anything else, with your time off?” Harry asked delicately.  
“Are you kidding? Me and Maeve didn’t last that long,” Bronagh said cavalierly. “It’ll be nice to get away, with a mate. Always the thing to do, after a break up.”  
“That’s settled then. Take lots of pictures, all right? I still want to see the Lake District…even if its just the photo album version,” Harry said.  
“Yeah, that’s a promise,” Ginny said, dazed at the intelligence that Bronagh’d had a girlfriend she didn’t know about, that Bronagh dated girls, and that they would be alone together in the Lake District for Valentine’s Day. Harry indicated that he had to be off, and both Ginny and Bronagh said goodbye, but Ginny’s mind was churning with waves, and she could barely hear her own voice.


End file.
